It’s always hard to tell where a story truly begins, and this one is no different. Looking back in time over the last two and a half years or so it’s easy to see your own choices as a set of dominoes, or decisions as catalysts in a chain reaction. How did I, a young man from the United States with no seeming connection to Europe, move to Poland? Where does this story begin? When I decided to move to Michigan? When I went to Thailand with my friends? When I bought my plane ticket to Lisbon? When I called my future boss up about a job offer? When I met Aga?

How many things have to happen precisely as is to make something so incredibly improbable happen? I’ll try to flesh out the answer to this question as I tell you the story of how I met the love of my life and moved across the world.

It was late spring 2017, I had decided with certainty I was quitting my job, leaving my good friends, and moving almost a thousand miles away from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to those of the Great Lakes. I’d become stuck in life, depressed, and needed a change. I didn’t know where to go or what to do, so I did the only thing that felt rational, which was to move back in with my parents for a while. They had permanently moved back to their home state of Michigan, a place where I had spent many summer nights on the lakes growing up. Before I left though I had recently made some travel plans. My best friend and roommate, JB, had just gotten into med-school and decided he wanted to celebrate by going to Thailand for a month. I told him I was in, so as the consistent third wheel in his life, him, his girlfriend Anna, and I bought tickets to Bangkok. In my mind at the time, traveling represented a kind of freedom and excitement I had been lacking in my life. A few years earlier I was reading a lot of travel blogs and always wondered how these people managed to live these incredible lives on the road. This was going to be my first glimpse into this world.

So we packed up and shipped out as we traveled through the backpackers dream of South East Asia. We had the most incredible time, and I couldn’t get over the feeling that waking up every day to a brand new adventure was almost addictive. It didn’t even matter to me what we were going to do, just that we were there and that feeling persisted.

So after a month we made our way home after I decided against continuing to travel with some friends to Malaysia. I got back and moved in with my sister for three weeks. She was going to drive me up to our parents house since my car had broken down a few months earlier and I had no means to get there. As fate would have it, while I was sitting on my sister’s couch wondering how I would find a way to get back on the road, I got a text from a friend, Charlie. That he and my other former roommate, Devin were going to head to Lisbon and Barcelona at the beginning of November. Mind you it was early July this time, I had just gotten back home, had no job, and very little money left to my name. But sometimes when life gives you opportunities you have to take them and find the solution later. So I bought a one way ticket from Boston to Lisbon on November 2nd, 2017.

I had basically just spent my last few dollars, so I had none to travel with, also I had no clue how I was going to get to Boston, but I knew I would. Excited once again, I felt my future laid in this decision, one way or another I was going to see the world.

So a few weeks later my sister and I drove to Michigan together overnight after she had gotten off of work. Something I still need to find a way to repay her for. After hanging out for a few days my parents told me it was time to hit the pavement and get out there and find a job. Where I was living it was mostly just seasonal work. I was in Northern Michigan where much of the local economy relies upon summer tourism. I headed into town, and couldn’t quite find anything promising, add to the fact that I really didn’t want to work here. With all of my experience in the restaurant industry I thought I’d be able to find something but everyone was fully staffed for the season. Sitting on a park bench I felt defeated. Not knowing what I would do.

A few days previous my family and I had gone out to a tourists and locals favorite. A strange Polish restaurant with a Native American theme, built by a Polish immigrant and members of the local Odawa tribe. I asked our server if they were hiring, she told us she wasn’t sure but she didn’t think so. Well while I was sitting on that bench, maybe a half hour or so drive from that same restaurant, I decided to give them a call to see. I figured the worst I could hear was no and I would continue my search elsewhere. I dialed them up, and on the other line was a voice I definitely wasn’t expecting, an old man’s with some kind of funny accent I couldn’t quite understand. As fate would have it, it was the owner.

An old man with a scruffy voice answers the phone, I ask him if they’re hiring, thinking he wouldn’t know the answer. He fires back at me “For what?” I told him for a server or a bartender position, and that I have experience in both. He asks when I can come in and talk, mind you at this point I didn’t even know who I was talking to, I told him 4 o’clock. He said “Today?!” And I said yes sir. He said when I get there to “Ask for George” and that was all I knew. So I get there, and ask for George. He told me to have a seat on the back bar and just to wait til he gets back. After about a half hour he comes back and hits me with the usual interview questions. Except for one which always stuck out at me, “Are you running from the law?” After I told him no, and filled out my application forms and gave him my references he told me he’d give me a call and I should be ready for some training on Friday, mind you it was a Wednesday and I had just moved up the past Saturday.

When I got home I told my parents I’d gotten a job and my sister looked at me and said “Why the hell does everything always work out for you?” I seem to have a bit of luck in situations that I go into blind, not my fault. Maybe the world had something in store for me. Now I know this story has been a little long-winded to get to this point, because as many of you know, Aga and I met at work. But there’s a reason for it, just stay with me.

So I get to work on Friday and start with my training. My new floor manager seemed very kind, she walked me around and introduced a bunch of people who were soon to be friends and coworkers but at the time, they were just people whose names I’d forget. And then on the precipice of the kitchen and garden she introduced me to Aga. I don’t remember much about that moment besides thinking “Jesus Christ Glen don’t even look at that girl, she’s way too beautiful for you, she’s out of your league, JUST DON’T EVEN LOOK HER WAY.” Thank god I didn’t listen to myself.

But for a little while I did, I didn’t say much to Aga at the beginning, especially since I learned her real name was Agnieszka and I knew I was going to butcher that, so I kept quiet. Now I know this story is told from my perspective but I would like to interject for a moment with something Aga told me. At the time they hired me she was MAD because she thought I would be taking shifts away from her, just a funny aside to show how strange these kinds of things can be. And then one day, Aga and I pulled a prank on our boss, and then we had a little war going between the three of us. Then my boss was always putting Aga and I in the sections next to each other, so we were always working together. And after work everyone would hang out and Aga and I would stay up til five or six in the morning, talking about god knows what, even when we had work at ten or eleven that morning. She’d listen to my drunk ramblings after the party, and she started to laugh when I tried flirting with her. One night I even told her if she wasn’t coming back to work the next season neither was I. People started joking if we were dating our kids would be normal height, since I’m short and she’s tall. I joked about introducing her to my parents as my girlfriend and she looked at me like I was crazy, deservedly so. And this all sounds well and good but there was only one problem, Aga had a longterm boyfriend back in Poland. And all of the jokes and flirting were pretty much in vain. From the time I had started work to the time Aga was leaving to go travel the States and go back home, was less than two months! But sometimes you just feel something.

So eventually it was time for her to leave, she was taking a bus to Chicago with a coworker and they were going to go travel out West and her boyfriend was flying into LA to meet up with them. She asked me if I would drop them off at the bus station. Naturally I agreed, by this time I thought I was in love with Aga and was sad to see her off but at least I would be able to say goodbye. We got to the bus station, waited around, it finally came, and they loaded up their bags. Our coworker Ala got on the bus, I said goodbye to Aga, gave her a hug, and she kissed me on the cheek. I probably had the biggest smile on my face. But that happiness faded with the sight of the bus driving off.

I got into my car and thought about how I would probably never see her again, and I cried. It was mid September by this point, work would be wrapping up in just over a month and I would be going with my friends to Portugal. It had turned from a party of three to six and I was looking forward to touching down in Lisbon and starting my new life. I thought I’d go to Poland and maybe Aga and I would meet up at least once but even that felt like a far off fantasy. I thought I had lost her. A few days went by and Aga had sent me some texts, a couple snapchats, I was surprised I thought she would leave and just forget about me, I thought she was going back to her real life. I remember at one point she was messaging me after she and her boyfriend had met up in LA, I asked how her trip was going. She said something along the lines of, like ehhh it’s okay I guess. I was astonished, I thought she would’ve been so happy to be in California with her boyfriend after not seeing him for three months. And on top of it all she was still messaging me while she was with him.

A week after I had dropped Aga off at the bus station I was back in Virginia to see some friends I had made plans with a year prior. It was basically the same people I would be going to Portugal with in a month, and the same couple I had just been to Thailand with 3 months earlier. I remember telling them about Aga, how we had gotten along, about how funny she was, how our time together had gone. I told them we were still talking but she was traveling with her boyfriend now, and I’ll never forget my friend Devin looks at me and says, “Don’t worry Glen, you’re a good guy man, you’re gonna find somebody eventually!” in his always bright and cheery manner. Words I needed but didn’t want to hear cause I thought I had met somebody already.

I got back to Michigan and had about a month of work left before the work season was over. The restaurant’s last day open was October 22nd, about ten days before I flew out to Lisbon. Timing seemed to be on my side, it easily could’ve been that I didn’t find a seasonal job and would’ve had to quit, or the restaurant could have stayed open longer, or we planned the trip earlier so I would’ve had to quit right at the time the restaurant is busiest at the end of the tourist season. But it wasn’t, and we didn’t. The world is a strange place, and I’d just gotten lucky. Like I said around this time work was ramping up, I was working all day everyday because the restaurant was so busy and I wanted to make as much money as I could before I left. By this time our plans had evolved beyond our initial two cities. After Barcelona, my friends Charlie, Joe, and I would continue traveling through Europe. Charlie was off to Amsterdam to meet his own fate there, and Joe and I would be flying to Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Milan. After which we were all parting ways and I was going to meet up with some friends in Athens, after which I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was thinking about going to Poland, then traveling through Europe or maybe Asia by myself.

Then one day Aga was texting me after she had gotten back home to Poland. And I’ll never forget the message I got from her, it read “You’ll never guess what happened in my life.” I had only one thought: holy shit please tell me you’re single. I wrote, “No, what?” And she wrote back that she and her boyfriend had broken up. That cold grey October day just got a lot brighter. It felt like my world had just opened up.

After messaging back and forth, and calling each other occasionally she asked me if it was okay if she met up with my friends and I in Portugal. I told her it was more than okay and I would love to have her join us. So she bought a ticket from Warsaw and sent me the confirmation later that day. I couldn’t even believe what was happening and one night after a hard day at work I found myself recounting the story with one of our cooks, Bobby.

I told him about how I decided to quit my job and move, how I had gone to Thailand with my friends, how I bought a ticket to Lisbon as soon as I got home because my friends had made plans and invited me, how I got the job at the restaurant, how I met Aga, and fallen for her, how she left, we kept in touch, she became single, asked me if she could join, that all of this was happening ten days after we close for the season. Like everything had just fallen into place, and I didn’t even have to try, that everything had just happened and I was just a witness along for the ride. He was like, “That’s a crazy fucking story man, life is wild, you can’t write that shit.” And he was right.

Not long after all of this happened I wrote a blog post of our beginnings in Portugal, so no need to tell that story. But this one is different. In all honesty this was where we started, this is our story. But it’s not really our story. This is a story about life, about decisions, about catalysts and reactions, about timing, about not being the writer of your own story but merely a character inside it. I’m not some huge believer in fate necessarily or even something like it. But when you look back in time and see how one thing can lead to another, you see how you’re not in control, that your thoughts and actions have greater consequence outside of your original intentions. And for that I’m forever grateful, no matter how it all came to be. I love you Aga, no different today than I did when we first met, everyday since has been a blessing. Happy birthday

With love always,

Glen